On Fri, 14 Mar 2014 12:49:42 -0500, John McKown <[email protected]> wrote:
Just catching up after a few days away from IBM-MAIN. I'm sure you've had lots of responses by now. >1) Has anybody ever had a VOLSER which was not exactly 6 non-blank >characters for a regularly used volume? Especially any trailing blanks? Disk or tape? For tape, not since using virtual tapes. Used to see them from vendors fairly often "back in the day". I recall being at a couple of shops that had less than 6 chars. for disk also. But that was a very long time ago when systems were much smaller. > >2) Has any commercial shop ever used non-numeric tape volume serials for >normal in-house tapes? If so, why? I ask because, at least historically, >CA-1's support of non-number tape serials was "difficult" (needed some sort >of mapping exit as I recall). > My client uses every letter and number in their ranges so there is no overlap between the many sysplexes / monoplexes in the environment. There used to be some overlap but when they migrated from one vendor's virtual solution to another in 2011, new unique ranges were chosen for all environments. And a lot of swapping also, to facilitate migration (for example Annnnn moved from sysplex #1 to sysplex #2, while Bnnnnn moved from sysplex #2 to sysplex #1). BTW, that migration included all physical tape as well so I have been in a tapeless environment since then. The CA-1 exits were fairly simple to use, but they aren't required any longer. The new method is much easier and I for one was very happy to get rid of them for this large environment I support. Mark -- Mark Zelden - Zelden Consulting Services - z/OS, OS/390 and MVS ITIL v3 Foundation Certified mailto:[email protected] Mark's MVS Utilities: http://www.mzelden.com/mvsutil.html Systems Programming expert at http://search390.techtarget.com/ateExperts/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
